Friday, June 12, 2015

Film Noir: The Darkness Returns

Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum in ‘Out of the Past’ (1947)

Okay,
I’ll spill. I promised four long
years ago to write some follow-up posts on film noir after my first one, saying
what I think does and does not make a movie “noir.” Well, time got away from me like an escaped con high-tailing
it from the heat. And I didn’t
think that I had very much to add to Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward’s
explanation of why they excluded gangster films, period pieces, and comedies
from Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style. Plus, after several blogposts about what does or does not
constitute a particular genre, I started feeling like a member of the genre
police. Still, I thought that a
few more ramblings from me about film noir (unlike the tales told by the movies
themselves) wouldn’t kill anyone.

First,
one reason why so many film buffs have so many different definitions for what
film noir is and isn’t is because the concept of “film noir” was established
virtually after the fact. French
critics in the late 1940s assigned the label film noir (‘black film’) to a number of
American movies that these critics saw as darker and more cynical than the
typical Hollywood fare. The
filmmakers who produced these movies didn’t see their offerings as related (except
in the most obvious ways, of course) and therefore didn’t see any need to
ensure that any of these films possessed one attribute or another.

In his
excellent book More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts(which I recommend to any reader
of an academic bent), James Naremore writes that “film noir” is an idea more than it is a body of film
texts. So, “film noir,” in this
view, can mean anything that anyone wants the term to mean. Moreover, Naremore points out that when
French critics first applied the label “film noir” to American movies, they
also attached it to non-crime motion pictures, such as Billy Wilder’s The
Lost Weekend
(1945), and only later was the term seen to apply exclusively to crime
films. So, the term itself has
evolved over time, and it will probably evolve some more, making any attempt
(like this one) to ascertain a hard-and-fast definition of “film noir” a fool’s
errand, much like trying to determine the identity of the first rock & roll record.

At the
same time, if the mantle of “film noir” can be applied to anything, that
renders the term virtually meaningless.
If you type the phrase “best noir films” into a Google search engine, a
number of movie posters for works described as such on the Web appear at the
top of your computer screen. In
addition to such widely accepted noir titles as Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947), and Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy (1950), there appears a poster
for Ridley Scott’s 1982 science-fiction film Blade Runner. Is Blade Runner a true example of noir? If so, why?
Yes, Blade Runner has many of noir’s trappings: the relentless investigator, the
hardboiled voiceover dialogue, shadowy photography, etc. But is this enough? If a category of film can encompass
both Gun Crazy
and Blade Runner,
is that category helpful? Let’s
take a closer look.

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in ‘The Big Sleep’ (1946)

In my
inaugural essay, I refer to film noir as a subgenre. I realize now that isn’t the word that I was looking
for. Noir films can be made of any
crime genre: a number are whodunits (The Big Sleep, Black Angel, etc.), suspense thrillers (Sleep, My Love; The Window; Alfred
Hitchcock’s works, etc.), and gangster films (most notably, White Heat, which, while not a “classic”
rise-and-fall story, is still about a gangster). So, film noir is something that can permeate genres, not a
subset of one. Therefore, I think
that we should retire the word “genre” and call noir something else. Since film noir is a vague concept, I
can’t think of anything better than the equally vague word “cycle.” Film noir — something that I think
lasted only in American-centered crime movies from the 1940s until the end of the
1950s — was a collection of styles and motifs that evolved, flourished, and
then ran its course. From here on
out, noir is a “cycle,” not a “subgenre.”

My
earlier definition of film noir, for the most part, still holds: “a
specifically Hollywood [or American-centered] crime drama made sometime between
the mid-1940s to late 1950s, characterized by cinematography with shadowy
low-key lighting and an urban-inflected story with the strong potential to
unnerve its audience.” The key
phrase is “unnerve its audience.”
The best noir films seem to pose some kind of existential dilemma to the
audience. The best tell stories
that, at least for a moment, unmoor the audience from a sense of moral
certainty and a sense of a steady place in the world around them. Silver and Ward say that one of film
noir’s most “consistent” attributes is the paranoid protagonist. They illustrate their point by quoting
dialogue spoken by detective Bradford Galt (Mark Stevens) in The Dark Corner (1946): “I feel all dead
inside. I’m backed up in a dark
corner, and I don’t know who’s hitting me.” Silver and Ward write:

With its
simple graphic language, Galt’s statement captures the basic emotion of the
noir figure. The assailant is not
a person but an unseen force. The
pain is more often mental than physical: the plunge into spiritual darkness,
the sense of being “dead inside.”
For Galt in his dark corner the mere fact of being outside the law is
neither new nor terrifying. It is
the loss of order, the inability either to discover or to control the
underlying cause of his distress, that is mentally intolerable. (p. 4)

This
component of uncertainty — however fleeting or however weakly contradicted by
the Production Code-approved happy endings — is key. If a 1940s-’50s crime drama doesn’t do something to unsettle
the audience, aficionados are unlikely to embrace the film as an example of
noir. In a DVD review of the
by-the-numbers police-procedural Union Station (1950) for the magazine Sight
& Sound, Tim
Lucas says:

True noir
is something specific, tales of existential entrapment, drenched in irony and
fatality. Films such as Union
Station —
monochromatic tales of trenchcoated dicks and sadistic criminals staying
resolutely on their own sides of the moral fence in a world where good
wholesomely prevails — cry out for a category all their own. So why not call them ‘near-noir’? (Sight & Sound, XX, 10, p. 88)

Sounds
good to me. One film that I
propose would be better branded as “near-noir” is a title often extolled as an
exemplar of the film-noir cycle: Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948). Critically praised for, among other things, its pioneering
use of location photography, The Naked City is often one of the titles first
mentioned as a pre-eminent specimen of the cycle. However, there’s little sense of moral ambiguity in Dassin’s
film. It’s a straight-ahead
police-procedural starring Barry Fitzgerald as an avuncular police investigator
whose twinkling presence soothes rather than unsettles. His younger plainclothes sidekick,
played by Don Taylor, is likewise uncomplicated: the biggest moral quandary he
faces is a boys-will-be-boys problem with his young son at home, and his
pinup-worthy wife (Anne Sargent) suggests that all is basically well within the
household. (Is there any doubt
that such a blissfully wedded and photogenic couple would have great sex?) In short, there’s nothing about The
Naked City that
implies any ethical abstruseness: we know who the good guys are and who the bad
guys are, and justice prevails.
Why do so many movie-savvy critics regard The Naked City as a film noir?

Mark Stevens (right) in ‘The Dark Corner’ (1946)

One point
of contention among noir enthusiasts is whether or not a particular movie
succeeds in unsettling its audience and, if so, to what degree. Two pictures often labeled as film noir
are two crime dramas with strong racial themes: Joseph L. Makiewicz’s No Way Out (1950) and
Samuel Fuller’s The Crimson Kimono (1959).
However, from where I stand, these two anti-racism tracts take such
pains to paint their minority co-leads as exemplars of all that is right and
good (Sidney Poitier in the former and James Shigeta in the latter) that this
leaves very little room for moral ambiguity or psychological dislocation. So, I have great difficulty accepting No
Way Out and The
Crimson Kimono as
examples of film noir. But I’m
sure that other movie mavens would disagree with me.

Similarly,
if there is anything else about a noir-era crime film that intervenes between
the audience and an inchoate sense of dread, such a movie would have a hard
time being seen as part of the cycle.
Silver and Ward list some elements that would likely keep the audience
at an arm’s length from the “true” noir experience. Here are some other necessary requirements for film noir:

A
crime: Film noir
is, first and foremost, a type of crime drama. The element of crime decisively ruptures the veneer of the
placid, morally secure society, and this usually snowballs into noir’s murky
interrogation of humanity’s dark side.
So, if no criminal conduct is present in a movie, it’s not a film
noir. For all of its pioneering
narrative and visual stylistics that would eventually become absorbed by film
noir, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) isn’t an example of the cycle: no crime is committed. On the other hand, such a requisite
crime may be large or small: it may be a vicious murder; or it may merely be a
robbery that is set right before it is discovered, as in The Steel Trap (1952); it may be only the
nominal “kidnapping” of a child in the next hotel room, as in Don’t Bother to Knock (1952);
or it may be trying to frame someone and an implied murder at the end, as in Sweet Smell of Success
(1957). Any crime will do. But no crime, no film noir.

John McGuire (left) and Peter Lorre in ‘Stranger on the Third Floor’ (1940)

A film
made during the 1940s or 1950s: While some commentators have seen so-called “neo-noir”
films of later decades as a direct extension of film noir into the present day,
most critics agree that the “classic” period for film noir lasted only from the
1940s to the 1950s. As Foster
Hirsch puts it in Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen:

Film
noir erupted in
full creative force during a comparatively concentrated period. In an early and influential article,
“Notes on Film Noir” (1972), Paul Schrader places its outer limits from The
Maltese Falcon in
1941 to Touch of Evil in 1958. In a more
strict dating, Amir Karimi, in Toward a Definition of American Film Noir, limits the period from 1941 to
1949. Later critics suggest that
the true heyday of noir lasted only a few years, from Wilder’s Double
Indemnity in 1944
to the same director’s Sunset Boulevard in 1950.
But the long-range view, with noir extending from the early forties to
the late fifties, is the most sensible, for the crime films of this period are
noticeably different in theme and style from those made before and after.

Films
noirs share a
vision and sensibility, indicated by their echoing titles: No Way Out, Detour, Street with No Name, Scarlet Street, Panic in the Streets, The Naked City, Cry of the City, The Dark Past, The Dark Corner, The Dark Mirror, Night and the City, Phenix City Story, They Live by Night, The Black Angel, The Window, Rear Window, The Woman in the Window, D.O.A., Kiss of Death, Killer’s Kiss, The Killing, The Big Sleep, Murder[,] My Sweet, Caught, The Narrow Margin, Edge of Doom, Ruthless, Possessed, Jeopardy. These wonderfully evocative titles conjure up a dark, urban
world of neurotic entrapment leading to delirium. The repetition of key words (street, city, dark, death,
murder) and things (windows, mirrors) points up the thematic and tonal
similarities among the films. (p.
10)

The
largest consensus among movie commentators that I’ve seen seems to be that the
first film noir is Boris Ingster’s The Stranger on the Third Floor (1940 — with its European director,
its “wrongly accused murderer” story, its expressionistic dream sequences, and
its strong suggestion of sexual desire), and the cycle ends with such unease-inducing films as
Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow, Irving Lerner’s City of Fear, and John Cromwell’s The Scavengers (all 1959).

As I said
in my first essay, film noir was largely shaped by the constraints of the
Hollywood Production Code, a sanitizing set of rules which compelled filmmakers
merely to imply disturbing issues (such as losing one’s sanity or the
desirability of social transgression) between the lines of a censor-approved
optimistic story. This created a
disconnect between the disturbing themes and the movies’ reassuring veneer, a
disconnect that fragmented the perceived wholeness and self-containment of the
filmic text. By 1960, the
weakening grip of the Hollywood Production Code meant that disturbing, impolite
themes no longer needed to be hidden, no longer ran the risk of potentially
bursting the bounds of a bowdlerized story. By the time Alfred Hitchcock made Psycho in 1960, the film’s openness
about such heretofore-verboten themes like adultery, non-marital sex, unambiguous gender
ambiguity, all-but-shown nudity, and the grisly gore of murder eliminated the
need merely to hint at their existence between the lines of a sanitized movie,
thus eliminating the danger of fracturing the film via such suggestive
indirection. So, like many others,
I set the timeframe of “true” film
noir between 1940 and 1959.

Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth in ‘Lady from Shanghai’ (1947)

American
protagonists or an American milieu: Film noir
intrigues its audience because it questions the optimism — and, some would say,
the naïveté — of the American dream and the American mythos. Noir films are stories of moral
scarcity in the land of plenty.
This is what gives film noir its disquieting edge. So, a film noir must either be set in
the U.S. or be about Americans living abroad, such as Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946), Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949, a
British film), and Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950). Lewis Milestone’s Arch of Triumph (1948) tells a sinister story of
intrigue with low-key lighting and high-contrast black & white photography,
but its French (and wartime) setting and French characters shield it from any
unsettling implications for an American audience. Two films often associated with noir are Fritz Lang’s M (1931) and Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1942), but since these are
European productions with European characters and European content (German and
Italian, respectively), they don’t fit the bill for noir. If a film noir is going to have a
non-American protagonist, the setting should still be in or around the United
States, as in Lady from Shanghai (1947), The Other Woman (1954), and Touch of Evil (1958).

A
contemporary setting:
To really shake up an audience, the viewer should feel that his or her sense of
security could be whipped out from under them at any moment. When a film is set in the recognizable
past, it removes this aura of urgency.
I say “recognizable” past because films set in the recent past (e.g., Double
Indemnity [1944]
is set six years before the movie was made, probably to avoid any reference to World War Two) are usually indistinguishable from films with a here-and-now
setting and don’t have this problem.
Therefore, a crime film like Hangover Square (1945), with its Victorian London
setting, reassures the audience that its unpleasant story is safely secured in
the unreachable past — have no fear.
For this reason (and its English characters), Hangover Square would not be considered noir.

However,
one period piece is often cited as an important film noir: Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter
(1955), set in the 1930s, some 20 years in the past. This period setting, the Southern Gothic trappings, and
Robert Mitchum’s flamboyant take on the lead character cushion the audience
from any sense of dread caused by the morally ambiguous plot or shadowy,
low-key lighting. As Silver and
Ward put it: “[T]he
period context [in the film] insulates [any noir] elements, as well as perverse
sexuality or character alienation, and mitigates the immediacy of their impact”
(p. 330). So, I don’t regard the
canonized Night of the Hunter as noir.

No
supernatural story element: A story instigated by a magical or paranormal problem can
easily be resolved by a magical or paranormal solution. A film noir should give its audience
the sense that a recognizable, real-life, uneasily rectifiable dilemma may just
be around the corner. A movie
featuring such an out-of-this-world problem cushions any sense of immediacy,
any sense that the viewer might soon face the same problem. So, for all of their noir-ish
trappings, a horror film like The Cat People (1942) and a science-fiction movie like Invasion of the
Body Snatchers
(1956) don’t count as the real deal.
(I hope that I have now given my reasons why Blade Runner, a science-fiction film from the 1980s, isn’t a film noir.)

Joseph Cotten and Marilyn Monroe in ‘Niagara’ (1953)

Black
& white photography?: And speaking solely for myself — and if you follow my blog at all,
you could probably guess this — I prefer a film noir to be in black & white. Some color films are
championed as film noir because of their quasi-expressionistic use of a
many-pigmented palette. Films
frequently held up as color noirs include John M. Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven (1945),
Henry Hathaway’s Niagara (1953), Samuel Fuller’s House of Bamboo (1955), Raoul Walsh’s The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1956), Alan Dwan’s Slightly Scarlet(1956),
and Alfred Hitchcock’s polychrome productions ofthe 1940s to ’50s. But
I’ve only seen a few of these movies.
When I’m in the mood for film noir, I want to see the shadowy patterns
on the screen shaped by the interplay of blacks, whites, and grays. These are the kind of movies that come
to mind when I hear the words “film noir.” However, I wouldn’t want to rule out the possibility of a
noir film shot in color. While
such a movie wouldn’t be my first choice when I’m in the mood for a film noir,
if color can abet any feelings of unease or disquiet in a crime drama, I would
be interested to see how its done.
A film noir in color is like life on other planets: it’s not something
I’m likely to see anytime soon, but I wouldn’t want to say it doesn’t
exist.